Category: meditating

My daughter said something yesterday that made me realize how desperately I need to emphasize this goal. The morning started as usual: I woke (late, because after the previous day’s toddler-driven sleep deprivation plus that night’s nightmares/anxiety attack I allowed myself to sleep in), got dressed and did my morning face/teeth/hair thing, fixed a cup of tea and started to work. Halfway through said work, Kai awakened and wanted to be nursed. Fine. We do this every day.

The problem arose when he finished nursing, but wanted to sit on my lap and twiddle. I wanted to set him down, because at that point I had roughly 2 more minutes of work to wrap up before I could take a break and get Anya off to school. He dug his heels in and refused, slapping me and screaming at me. I yelled back. We proceeded to fuss at each other for the next 20 minutes, while I tried to work with one hand and hold him off with the other. When I went to awaken Anya for school (late, now), I had no patience left; when she did her usual dawdling thing, I snapped at her.

Anya, being my insightful girl, asked me (once she was dressed and ready to go; she’s no dummy) if I’d slept okay the night before. Because she’s learned that when Mommy doesn’t get enough sleep, Mommy is cranky and low on patience. I told her that no, I hadn’t had enough sleep the night before. And that’s when I realized that nothing that had transpired that morning was actually that bad; I was just tired and headachy and lacking the resources to deal with conflict.

I apologized to Anya. Then to Kai. The morning proceeded much more smoothly after that. (Though not 100% smoothly; Kai is still nearly 3. And when he is tired, he acts out. Imagine that.)

A second example: Later in the morning I realized I had been rubbing my nose for hours. Earlier, as I was in a hurry, I used a lotion I know upsets my allergies, because (a) it works quickly and (b) it was there. I washed it off after dropping Anya at school, as I had been hacking my head off ever since I put it on, but apparently I didn’t get it all. So I scrubbed my hands and forearms, and used the nose spray (Flonase, otherwise known as my nose’s BFF) to boot. No more itchy.

This type of allergic reaction isn’t a huge deal by itself, but we’re fast approaching one of my worst allergy windows: Soggy late winter mold plus tree pollen. If I am to avoid getting a sinus infection, I need to keep a tight rein on my allergies. Which means not blowing off minor irritations like postnasal drip. It’s all cumulative.

I need to be more mindful, in other words. Little things snowball into big things — but if they are caught early enough, they can be dealt with easily and much misery can be averted. It’s a whole lot easier to grease the squeaky wheel than to replace it.

Coupled with yesterday’s thoughts on calm, I think the solution is clear: I need to meditate more. Every day. I need to make it a habit, as I’ve made brushing and flossing twice a day. (And look, I never thought I’d be a morning brusher; it took me years to train myself to floss consistently.) So I’m bringing back the meditation challenge, and I will stick with it until the meditation habit sticks. This is more important than the sugar thing (nobody cares if I kick sugar entirely if I’m a bitch), so I’m bumping that down the priority list for now.

I’m also going to track my mindfulness work so I don’t let it slide. (Yes, another goal. It’s who I am; I’m hardly going to change that now.) Simply meditating every day isn’t enough; I need to pay attention and act on what I observe. squeaksqueaksqueak

I may not have gotten the daughter I expected, but I think I got the daughter I needed. I’d do well to be more mindful of her wisdom, too.

Like this:

I think I mentioned this in passing, but I have challenged myself to meditate each day for a month. I’ve decided that month should be June. I’ve got a lot going on right now (seriously, just more than I can wrap my mind around, this week alone), and that’s usually a recipe for disaster where I’m concerned.

For instance, I shout a lot when I’m stressed. And now so do the kids. I know this doesn’t make me a bad parent, or even necessarily a unique one, but I can’t help but feel I’m letting them down when they yell like that. I would like to yell less — not at all would be ideal. But first I have to lower my stress levels.

I can’t change my circumstances. No matter how things pan out in the next few weeks, life’s going to be stressful for a while. If I am to attain any chill, I’m going to have to do so despite the events in my life at present. A month of meditation would do me a world of good.

It helps Anya, too. So I’m shooting for bedtime, mother-daughter meditation sessions. A bonding activity, a sleep aid, and a coping mechanism all rolled into one. Yes, please.

Ultimately, I’m hoping to ingrain this behavior into our daily routine, so that we would no more skip meditation than we would teeth brushing. But to create a habit, first you have to start it. Consider today the first step.

Like this:

But also busy, and I promised my kids I’d take the afternoon off, so I thought I’d resurrect my Friday goal update post. Except my goals have shifted since I last wrote one of these, and I have a whole bunch of goals at the moment, so I can’t possibly write updates on each. Here’s the highlights.

Goals

Daily meditation. Though I have not started my meditation challenge, I’ve meditated every day this week. It’s helping. It also appears to be helping Anya. Still hoping I can turn this into our thing.

Family game night. We’ve actually had a few of these. Kai has shown increasing interest in playing games. And then loses interest, because games are long and he is 2. But I am encouraged; perhaps he will be the push we need to game as a family.

Eating. Nobody is into it right now. I’m still in stressy not-eating mode. The rest of my household would rather snack. So I’m just trying to make sure we have healthy snacks for them. Meals will come later…but it may be fall.

Bedtime routine. I’m trying to steer us toward a better bedtime routine: Medicine, teeth, shower, story time, meditation, then TV. Because by the time we get to the meditation part, Anya’s falling asleep. (Kai is still napping erratically; we probably won’t get him into a regular bedtime til we fix that.) It’s a work in progress, but progress is being made.

Exercise 30 minutes per day. Not every day, but more this week than I have been. The weather’s been beautiful, though, so that’s been easy. June-August will likely be another story entirely.

Work with the kids on their letters/numbers/sounds. Anya got a wonderful report card yesterday! She went from only having mastered about half of what she was expected to know to knowing nearly all of it. This after having missed literally half the school year. I’m amazed at her resilience, and how quickly she’s learned.

She’s still struggling with speech, and her IEP report card wasn’t as wonderful as her pre-K one, but she’s doing a great job considering how many speech classes she missed. Practice is really helping. I’m also making sure some of the books we read are short and repetitive, so she becomes familiar with the look of the words, because that helps her figure out what sounds she’s missing.

Kai, too, is picking up what I’m putting down. We practice letters and numbers (which I’ve written on the shower wall in bath crayon, for visual reference), body parts (joints are hard, but he’s got the main pieces down), and I’m starting to throw some colors in there. The trick with both kids is short sessions every day. Neither of them have the patience for long lessons, but five minutes here and there makes a huge difference.

Blog regularly. Five posts in five days is serious improvement over my recent posting (non)schedule.

Actually, I’m cross-posting this from 43t; I don’t have that much free time today. And I wanted to get this stuff down so I can think about it, and write about it, and hopefully even do it.

As I think I mentioned somewhere, I want to do 43 things in my 43rd year. I’m adding the caveat that they can’t be boring things, like “spring clean my house!” or “purge my closet!” that I’ve done time and again and simply feel like I should do them to be a good person or whatever. These are things I want to do to say I’ve done them (projects), or because doing them will help me progress in other goals (challenges), or because establishing that routine will have a lasting impact on my life (habits), or simply because I want to do something nice for myself once in a while.

Some of these list items require explanation, and I’ll provide that in later posts. Which means I have plenty of fodder to help me achieve #31.

My overall goal with this list is not just to do 43 things for the sake of doing them, but to look back over this year next May and see that I’ve made progress instead of simply keeping the plates spinning. I have no illusions that this is going to be hard; as much as the kids have been sick this past year, at times everything has fallen apart, and I have had zero time and energy left over for extras. But I don’t want to look back on my life and see that I spent my time cleaning and shopping and watching TV. I want to do as much as I can with the time I’ve been given, and nurture the blessings in my life rather than squander them.

Health
4 Be able to run a mile
5 Meditate every day
6 Exercise 30 minutes per day
7 Cook a meal using ingredients I grew myself
8 Have family dinners 4+ nights a week
9 Discover 10 healthy meal recipes the kids will eat

Family
10 Read to the kids for 20 minutes each day
11 Help Anya with her speech 5 minutes each day
12 Work with Kai on letters, numbers, and word sounds 5 minutes a day
13 Have art time with the kids once a week
14 Introduce my kids to the library
15 Start a family heirloom collection
16 Have a weekly family game night
17 Make time for R (a monthly date night would be ideal)
18 Resume monthly family outings
19 Get married
20 Have an awesome familymoon

Career/Money
34 Brush up on my ID/PS/IL skills
35 Identify and take classes that will help with my career
36 Piece together sufficient freelance work/obtain full-time employment
37 Stabilize my finances
38 Put the same name on all of my credit cards
39 Put together a portfolio website

Foster Joy
40 Read one book a month
41 Grow flowers
42 Make time for friends
43 Have one do-nothing day per month

I tried Calm’s new walking meditation today. Rather than my usual drum-driven music, or the soothing indie list I put together when I was walking at 4 a.m. and found the drums too jarring, I listened to a meditation prompt with ethereal ambient music in the background. And it was…nice. I was able to maintain a pace of 3.5 mph for the full 30 minutes; apparently I don’t need drums for that. And I liked having the prompts to bring me back to the meditation when my mind wandered.

I’ve been doing pretty much this exact meditation as I walk. Focusing on the sensations in my body, and to a lesser extent the park around me. But the prompts help me concentrate on my surroundings, which I desperately need to do. I need to shift my mindfulness focus outside my body at least part of the time, because when I focus on my body I become my pain. My attention is drawn to my aching knee, the stiff tendon in the ankle I sprained, my tight hip, the adhesions surrounding my cesarean scar. It’s fascinating to me how the pain is often connected. My tight hip pulls on my lower back and my knee, but it also tugs on my abdominal scar. My ankle injury, which was localized around the ankle bone, causes pain from the tips of my toes and the arch of my foot all the way up to just below my knee. As I move, as I focus on each area of discomfort, I see just how interconnected the human body is. How one weakness affects so many areas.

In a way, this mindfulness helps me give extra care to these problem areas, so that they reap full therapeutic benefits from the exercise. But psychologically, there’s not much benefit in wallowing in physical pain for half an hour. So I extend my focus to the sky, to the trees, the birds, the leaves on the ground. It was a beautiful misty morning. I’m glad I got to experience it.

The best part? I came home calm, peaceful, and full of energy. Not exhausted and wrung out and stressed.

I still want to curate a walking playlist of uplifting energetic songs. Because some days I need a kick in the butt. But for now, walking meditation works for me. And it kills two birds with one stone — meditation and exercise — which always wins points with me.

Like this:

7:00 Vitamins/medicine for everybody. I start prep work for the next day:

Set out clothes for Anya and myself (Kai will wear jammies until after breakfast)

Pack Anya’s lunch, setting the refrigerated items in their designated place in the fridge

Verify that all homework is done, all forms signed, etc. I almost always take care of this stuff immediately after school, but I feel better if I double-check.

7:30 Tidy up kitchen and prepare for bedtime.

Get our bedside water (Anya and Kai) and ginger tea (me) ready

Set out jammies, plus a diaper for Kai

8:00 Brush teeth (mine and the kids) and shower. Usually the kids shower with me (which is all sorts of fun when I’m shaving); sometimes R takes one and I take the other, and occasionally they opt to take a bath and I shower all. by. myself. (Which is, at this point, a very strange, slightly lonely feeling.)

Jammie up and get into bed

Read a story or 5

9:00 Lights out; watch cooking show and nurse Kai until the kids are asleep (which usually takes less than 15 minutes).

Catch up on email, social media; maybe play a game

Drink a cup or two of tea

Listen to my deep sleep meditation

In the mornings, I also have a routine:

6:00 Get up. (Or, as has been the case during our recent spate of late nights, hit snooze until 6:15.)

A bit rigid for pre-K? Perhaps. But you have to understand what mornings were like when I was a kid. Lots of fussing. There were usually tears. It was a stressful way to start the day.

I like that our mornings are stress-free zones. Yes, she occasionally fights me. She does not want to wake up and go to school; who does? But our mornings are nowhere near as frustrating as mornings were when I was a child.

So I will continue my overscheduling, even if it interferes with spontaneity and weeknight play time. Because all days should start — and end — well.

Like this:

The other day, I noticed Kai looking intently out the living room window, and peeked outside to see what he was looking at. Not two feet from the window hovered a hummingbird, trying to figure out if the tassels on Anya’s old tricycle offered any nectar.

Each fall for the past several years, I’ve answered the 10Q questions. One year, a hummingbird featured heavily in my answers. I’d seen this hummingbird off and on for weeks, and it had become somewhat of a mascot.

At the time, I was crushed by financial stress. I’d given up my full-time job for a part-time one, and was struggling to build a freelance side business to make up the slack. R was working, too, but we were still drowning. All along, I’d held firm to my faith that I was stubborn enough to make things work, but I was starting to waver. The what-ifs were winning.

One morning, as I sat on the front porch smoking and stressing, a hummingbird darted up and hovered, inches from my face. We looked into each other’s eyes a long, long moment, and then it darted away again, taking my breath with it.

At once, my worries were forgotten. All I could see was the bright fall morning. How the light fell on the trees, making them glow. The tattered clouds gleaming in the eye-wateringly blue sky. And the emerald green of the visitor who had just rocked my mental boat.

This is more the type of photos my cell phone was capable of.

The hummingbird visited me several times that fall, and each time I was transported from my dark valley of rumination into the present moment. Which was never as bad as my mind insisted it was.

When I look back on that fall now, what I remember are the bright points — the gorgeous fall weather, my adorable daughter, the warmth and security I felt in our little home. And green, green, glowing green. I was quite unhappy at times, I know, but that’s not what I feel when I recall those times.

I’ve learned a lot about mindfulness from that bird. And the transience of trouble. I’ve learned that the mind sifts through the moments of your life, and hangs on to the very best ones. So, too, am I learning to let the darker ones go.

I haven’t seen a hummingbird in several years. Probably because I quit smoking, and thus no longer spend a great deal of time on my porch. But part of me chooses to think that the hummingbird returned because I needed it. I know that’s not the case — not actually possible, really — but it appeals to the poet in me.

Some day, when I am an old woman, I will look back on all of this and wonder what I was so bent out of shape over. Because in my mind’s eye, it will all be glowing green.